VII
“SHINE” had wriggled through the opening in the timbers and risen under the floor of the pier in a dense smoke that was lit with flames. He had swum to a slimy cross-beam and straddled it to draw a deep breath through a crack in the cribbing. And now he was hauling in the line, hand over hand, choking and sputtering. The nozzle rose between his knees. He jerked once on the signal rope, heard Keighley’s muffled cry of “Start yer water!” and threw himself on his belly on the nozzle and the beam. The air gushed in a mighty sough from the pipe. The hose bucked and kicked up underhim. The stream spurted from it and broke, hissing, on the blaze.
“Go it!” he said, through his teeth, riding the hose and clinging to the slippery timbers. “Go it yuh son of a mut!”
He had left the weight of discipline on the deck behind him with his uniform, and he had returned to the naked audacity of the days when he had obeyed no rules but those of the “club.” He was no longer a fireman; he was a young hoodlum enjoying an adventure, and he looked up at the blaze before him with a grin. He heard Lieutenant Moore’s squad chopping at the planks above him, and he listened contemptuously. He thought of Captain Keighley, and it was with the admiring thought of a younger “Shine” for the leader of his gang.
He was still clinging to his beam when Cripps rose blowing behind him, having followed up the trail of the hose. But the flame and smoke had already been driven back sufficiently to clear the air; and “Shine” greeted the freckled “Jigger” with jubilant curses. “Come on here, Cripsey!” he cried. “We got her beat to a stan’ still. Take a hold o’ the spout. We’ll slush it around.” And when Cripps swam up beside him and threw his weight on the pipe, “Shine” shouted in the generous exultation of the moment, “Listen to Moore up there, tappin’ on them planks like a footy woodpecker.... Slush her over in the corner there.... The cap’s too wise ferhim. He’s too damn hard-headed an ol’ clinker fer Moore.”
Cripps blinked the water out of hiseyes and replied guardedly, “There’s nuthin’ in it fer us, any how.”
“He’s a better man’n Moore, all right, all right,” “Shine” repeated. “We’d been all burned to blisters in the bottom o’ that Dutch cotton-tub if it hadn’t been fer him.”
“Well, that’s where Moore fell down,” Cripps answered at the top of his voice. “He was scared stiff.”
“The damn ol’ clinker!” “Shine” said-referring to the captain. “That’s a good name fer him, eh? ‘Ol’ Clinkers,’ eh?” And they were laughing together in a sort of cowed respect and admiration for Keighley when they heard him say gruffly, behind them, “Play that stream lower, along the cribwork. Them timbers is afire outside.”
“Shine” ducked his head, and then looked over his shoulder. The old manreached an arm to the pipe and growled, “To yer right. To yer right.”
They applied themselves to their work like a pair of schoolboys caught idling.
“Good enough,” Keighley said at last. “Keep that stream off me, now.” And climbing over the beam, he swam forward into the fading glow of the fire.
“Hully gee!” “Shine” said. “I wonder if he caught on.”
He had “caught on.” He understood that those two men had been the leaders, under Moore, of the attempt to drive him from the company; and he understood from their talk that Moore’s followers had deserted him. He snorted the salt water from his nose; Mister Moore’s claws were cut, then, sure enough. Well—
At the next cross-beam he saw thatthe fire was blazing far ahead of him in a sort of flooring of loose planks; and he could make out what seemed to be two carpenter’s horses covered with boards for a table, some boxes for stools, and a pile of burning straw that had been bedding. He swam back to bring the men, and found Farley and “Turk” Sturton splashing up with a second line of hose. He ordered them in with it as impassively as though he were in full uniform on the deck of theHudsoninstead of straddling a sunken beam, the water trickling into his eyes from his grey hair, dressed in dripping underclothes and commanding four nude firemen who grinned at one another when he turned his head.
“Shut off that pipe,” he said to “Shine,” “an’ light up on this other line.”
He led them—splashing and laughing and tugging on their hose—into the drip of hot water from the lines of the shore companies above them. The stream from one of theHudson’sstandpipes, dashing against the burning timbers outside, blew stinging sheets of spray through the slits of the cribbing on them. The warm smoke puffed back at them in stifling clouds. “Turk-ish b-bath,” “Shine” gasped. “Ouch! Gee! That about parboiled me lef’ lug! Gi’ me air! Gi’ me air!”
“I’ll brain any man that tries to open this door before I give the word”
See page 40
“Come on!” Keighley ordered.
“Turk” Sturton followed the voice of authority. “Shine” followed the voice of the man. Cripps obeyed where obedience had been proved the wiser policy. Farley went to do the work for which he was paid. Their obedience drew them together like a yoke; theyhelped one another, rubbed shoulders facing a common enemy, and touched hands in an almost friendly sympathy, sharing one task and one danger.
They stopped when the hose would come no farther, and Sturton sent back the signal for water. “Some Guinny had a roost in there,” Farley said, peering through his fingers at the flames.
“Shine” replied, “’Tust to be the gang’s club-house. There she goes!” He shouted, above the noise of the stream, “She ain’t insured, at that!”
Keighley rested his elbows on a beam, rubbed his smarting eyes, and grunted half-disgustedly. To him “Shine’s” playfulness was the ingratiating gamboling of a dog that had tried to bite him. He felt no inclination to pat the treacherous cur; but neither did hepurpose to kick him. To Farley “Shine” seemed to show a spirit of good-fellowship that let bygones be bygones and reduced their relations to the merely human intercourse of man and man. To Sturton, absorbed in his duties, it was the encouragement of a kindred spirit who took the joy of battle more noisily than he.
The blaze, caught at close range, seemed to snuff out as suddenly as if it had been no more than the flame of a candle; and when Keighley looked back over his shoulder in the darkness, he saw the spark of a belated lantern which Lieutenant Moore was lowering through the hole that his squad had cut in the floor. “There’s the loot’nt,” “Shine” sang out impudently. “If he ain’t careful with that lamp he’ll set fire to somethin’.” And the laugh thatfollowed came heartily from the men.
Keighley made his way back to the lantern and called to Moore to put a ladder down. “Fire’s out here,” he shouted. “Go in up there an’ help wet down.”
He waited at the foot of the ladder until he was sure that the last glimmer of flame had been extinguished below; then, calling to his own squad to leave their lines and “back out,” he climbed the ladder to the floor of the pier.
There was no one there to laugh at his ridiculous appearance, except the wharf watchman, who had returned to the scene of the fire from the safety of a car-float in a neighboring slip. Keighley strode over to him. “Got any ripe bananas yuh don’t want?”
“Sure,” the man replied. “Take all youse can ate.”
“Shine” came up the ladder, panting from a race with Sturton. Keighley touched him on the bare shoulder. “Take a bunch o’ those bananas aboard with yuh,” he ordered, “an’ be damn quick about it.”